Zionism and Judeo-Islamic Relations in the Middle East: Libya’s Position · 31 1the Palestinian upheaval in Lebanon, not confining his hatred to the state
of Israel alone but speaking out against Jews living outside it as well. This
was illustrated, for example, when the “Radio of Vengeance and Sacred
Hate,” allegedly a Libyan station, incited North African Arabs to rise up
and kill Jews living in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. While Libya denied
hosting this radio station, Tripoli nevertheless praised its message.^8 Qa-
dhafi’s strong enmity was fed by his view that a powerful global alliance
composed of “Zionism, imperialism, and Arab reaction” had set itself the
goal of taking action against Libya and the whole Arab world. A typical
allegation of this supposed conspiracy was the repeated statement that
the “Zionist enemy has U.S.-made and Saudi-financed cluster bombs to
destroy 150 million Arabs.”^9
The Palestinian uprising, the intifada, which broke out in the late 1980s
against Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza, once more provoked
Qadhafi, and he called on the Palestinians “to extend the uprising all over
the region from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea and from
south Lebanon to southern Palestine.”^10 Even if the world decided “to
establish a state for the Jews,” he argued, “the Arabs refuse to agree that
it would be at our own expense. The Arabs do not need to pay for Hitler’s
crimes.”^11 In this spirit, he reiterated his call to liquidate “the Zionist oc-
cupation” and repeated his opinion that Israel “has no right to exist.”^12
Paradoxically, during the late 1980s, while Qadhafi maintained his
stream of invective toward Israel and persistently called for its removal
from the map, the militant Libyan Islamist opposition called for his re-
moval from power, citing among other evils the claim that he was the
“hireling of Zionism.” At the same time, Qadhafi, who waged war against
the Islamists, used exactly the same terminology, accusing them of being
“Muslim traitors who are acting under the wing of Zionism [and under
the impact of] the Zionist Intelligence Agency.”^13 This ironic “game of
words” encapsulates what has been portrayed as hatred toward Israel
or in its equivalent term, Zionism, and has become deeply interwoven in
Libyan discourse and politics.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the rising tide of Soviet Jewish immigra-
tion to Israel in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union
became an especially sore point for Qadhafi. He perceived this issue as
an adverse eventuality, especially in light of the subsiding hostilities of
the cold war and a tipping of the balance of power in the Middle East
increasingly in favor of the United States—Israel’s ally and Libya’s sworn